Tag Archives: Cool Things

Rurouni Kenshin

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Manga is more than just a variation of comics – it’s a learning experience! A great example of this is Nobuhiro Watsuki’s classic Rurouni Kenshin. The title character is an Issin Shishi veteran of the Meiji restoration, one who lived as a killer, an elite fighter sent to eliminate the most dangerous opponents of the revolution. What’s so interesting about this story is that it doesn’t take place during the Bakamatsu, but rather afterwards.

All soldiers need somewhere to go when the war is over but people rarely plan that far ahead. The Bakamatsu was no exception. So when the long days of fighting are over Kenshin is left with nowhere to go and no idea how he goes from a hardened killer to the citizen of a peaceful country. Like many long veteran soldiers, Kenshin finds he loathes fighting and sets out to live in peace. He exchanges his katana for a sakabato and vows to never kill again.

Unfortunately, back in the day Kenshin had quite the reputation and a decade after disappearing into the mists of history Kenshin finds that someone has stolen his name and is using his old reputation for their own ends. Living in peace is not enough to satisfy, it seems. Kenshin must ultimately seek redemption for his misdeeds. He will find it only in humility, service towards others and diligently performing housework for women who will never learn to do it on their own. Everything from the way he lives to the way he speaks, referring to himself in a diminuitive fashion and addressing most other people with the highly respectful “dono“, point to the change in Kenshin.

Rurouni Kenshin is a shonen manga to the core – it has lots of action, lots of humor and an emphasis on making the community you live in a better place.  Every time Kenshin swings his blunted blade he does so in the hopes that the ideals he fought for during the Bakumatsu will be upheld in the new era but, unlike many works about the past, Watsuki makes no attempts to sugarcoat the reality of the Meiji era. Yes, there were patriots out there on both sides of the conflict. But by and large most people were seeking their own gain.

As a weekly comic that ran for five years, Kenshin had a lot of time to look at the various forms that took. Disreputable merchants looking to buy power over people, disreputable teachers looking to play the wealthy and well intentioned for their own ends, well intentioned men branded criminals so others wouldn’t take the heat, virtuous men who turn to violence and crime in the search for petty revenge. All these and more are things that Watsuki and Kenshin stare down through the pages of their manga. Each one is overcome by relying on three simple rules:

  • Serve humbly.
  • Fight for the oppressed.
  • Teach others to do the same.

Rurouni Kenshin is a great yarn about a country, an era and the people that made it. It’s not going to give you anything like a comprehensive idea of what the time was like but it will give you a starting place. None of the historical events mentioned in it are made up, although much of the story taking place around those historical facts is pure fantasy. But there’s still one thing beyond sketchy that Kenshin teaches.

Heroes, it seems, look the same no matter what the culture or the era.

Cool Things: Trigun

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Okay, I’ve hinted a few times that I like some elements of Japanese culture. Not just the classic stuff like Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai or calligraphy, the pop culture that has produced things like Astroboy or Dragonball. The question I so often get when people find this out is… why?

It’s hard to just sit down and say, “Well, you see it’s this and this and this that make it all so interesting.” Have you ever tried to explain your favorite band to someone who’s never heard their music? If so, you understand what I mean. Even if you have a well reasoned, even handed argument for why you like them it doesn’t mean much unless the person you’re talking to has heard their music. (If they haven’t you’re probably ready to subject them to a few dozen bars of off key singing that will fail to make you any friends. Unless, of course, you’re one of those people and you can actually sing.) The fact is, it needs to be experienced, as often as not.

Anime and manga, the elements of Japanese culture that I get the most, are the same way. I can’t really pour the experience straight into your brains but I can recommend some places for you to start. Thus and so I proclaim July 2014 to be Japanophile month here at Nate Chen Publications and I’m going to use these here Wednesday segments to talk about some of the things that drew me to the twin mediums of manga and anime.

A quick aside on terms. Rather than write out everything here, I’ve made a separate post where several words that are used in this month’s posts will be defined. And from here on out I’m going to link to it every time I use one of these terms with the exception of anime and manga. Just so you know. Shonen will like to the Japanese Terms Cheat Sheet every time it’s a hyperlink. If you remember what a given term means you don’t need to click on it every time. Or just keep it open in another tab while you’re reading this.

So. Pretty much the first anime I ever watched in its entirety was Trigun and it still has this special little place in my heart even though, looking back on it, it only accomplished so much narratively or artistically.

Trigun is a good place for the anime novice to start for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s one of the three anime Space Westerns created in the 1980s and 1990s. If you’ve seen Firefly you have a good idea of the aesthetics of these space westerns, although the exact balance of elements varied between the three.

Trigun had the most western and the least space. As a result it’s chalk full of imagery that will be familiar to Western audiences in general and us Americans in particular. Gun slingers, taverns and great sprawling deserts are all a part of the scenery in Trigun.

At the same time they’re on another planet (which I don’t believe we ever learn the name of.)

Basically, the people there were part of a colonization project gone awry that crashed on planet hundreds of years ago. The details are fuzzy at start but are explored in more detail as the series goes on, point is the disaster set humanity back but more due to a lack of resources and infrastructure than a loss of information. And the planet is a desert so it’s not like it’s a hospitable environment, either.

There’s still some high technology running around, cyborg arms, futuristic power plants and even the rotting, semifunctional hulks of old colony ships. But at the same time most people exist in a world where what’s generally available wouldn’t be out of place in the 1890s and wound up looking like they belong in the old west.

There were twelve colony ships that crashed and each one had a city built around its ruins. These twelve cities, named after the months of the year, were the centers for human culture, learning and progress – at least until a lone man completely annihilated one of them over night using methods no one quite understands. Since this is a space western the man who is blamed for the incident had a price put on his head. Like all great outlaws he’s best known by the name they put on his wanted poster and that name is Vash the Stampede.

If you think that sounds dumb you don’t know much about the kinds of names people used out on the range.

Although it is an odd choice of a name since there’s no herd animals to stampede anywhere on the planet, at least so far as we see, so it’s not like people are going to have vivid images in their minds of what a stampede looks like…

Anyway, Trigun revolves around Vash and what people do about him. It’s got a very distinct story structure with beginning, middle and end, themes of learning to correctly evaluate people and a story of truly epic sibling rivalry plus some really weird names, slapstick comedy galore and gunfights to put The Matrix to shame. It’s fast, frenetic and fun, at least most of the time. That said, to really get what drew me in about the series you only have to watch the first five episodes.

(ASIDE – Trigun, like many anime series of its day and even some now a days, aired 26 episodes. Since one of those episodes was a mid-season recap it essentially had 25 episodes of plot development. The first 20% of the series is, in my opinion, the best part from a storytelling perspective. Not to say the rest isn’t good stuff, but it’s what really grabbed me.)

We start off by meeting Meryl Strife and Milly Thomson, insurance adjustors from the Bernardelli Insurance Company. They’re looking for Vash not for the bounty on his head, or even to try and claim damages from him, but because his tendency to leave chaos in his wake ever since he wiped a city off the map is costing the company money. Meryl and Milly are supposed to try and keep other people away from him, thus hopefully preventing further incidents that will cost the company even more money.

These two women are following rumors of Vash and are stymied when they encounter not one, not two but three men who match the description. They eventually write off all three as not Vash and continue their quest – but we, the audience, see enough of one of them to draw three conclusions:

  1. He’s really Vash the Stampede, just keeping a low profile.
  2. He’s very laid back for a coldblooded killer and, in fact, seems intent on avoiding conflict, passing off his considerable abilities as bumbling.
  3. He loves donuts.

Over the first five episodes Meryl and Milly watch Vash wrap up one incident after another – mixed-up bounty hunters, greedy land owners, bank robbers and a hostage situation – all without getting anyone killed. Each time the stakes get a little higher and it gets harder to hide the fact that under that sunny disposition and carefree attitude there’s steel and courage and possibly even something a little darker.

Episode 5, “Hard Puncher” is where it all comes together. Vash wanders into a town that has a failing power plant. Without power to keep things running the town will loose access to water and machinery to keep the desert at bay and it will quickly die. Getting an engineer to fix the plant is incredibly expensive – but Vash has the highest bounty in history and it’s more than enough to set things right.

Except Vash will not turn himself in quietly. He is, in fact, willing to fight the whole town.

And he does.

It’s not the first time Vash has done this. Obviously it didn’t work before but this town has a secret weapon. After all their efforts to catch him themselves they fall back on the old maxim that to catch a thief… And so they turn the biggest criminals they have on hand, a steam powered cyborg and his mad scientist “father” known collectively as the Nebraskas, loose on Vash.

This proceeds to backfire within fifteen seconds. (Surprise!)

The Nebraskas show no concern for the wellbeing of the townfolk and smash the place up even worse trying to catch Vash. In turn Vash busts his butt trying to keep the townspeople who are trying to throw him in jail safe. Finally the Nebraskas grab the villain ball and try to kill some townfolk just to prove they’re bigger than Vash (which is literally, if not figuratively true.)

In the end Vash beats the Nebraskas and saves the townfolk – even though they were determined to throw him in jail just hours before. Our lacksidasical, donut eating protagonist may be more of a hero than we thought, ruined cities or no.

Now this may not sound like anything special. But what impressed me at first and still impresses me now is how we learn about Vash. He never flat out says he’s Vash the Stampede, to keep a low profile, sure, but even when situations have already gone south he doesn’t trot out his reputation to try and scare off enemies. In fact, he doesn’t ever try for any kind of recognition – well, other than maybe some attention from the ladies.

We learn about Vash by what he does, not what he says or even what other people say about him (except for how it contrasts with the character we see.) It’s very strong writing like you don’t see much in any venue. Yes, the series doesn’t entirely live up to its early promise but it always does an excellent job with its character building and that’s why it still has a special place in my heart.

If your interested in checking out Trigun Funimation, the company that owns the license to distribute Trigun in America, has made the series available on Youtube. If you enjoy animation or character building it’s worth looking at.

Cool Things: Child of Light

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It’s time for the rare video game review! Child of Light is a 2D Adventure RPG developed by Ubisoft Montreal that is notable for three things – it’s sense of whimsy, it’s beautiful presentation and a new twist on old game elements. Some people are going to call this game retro. I’m going to say they’re wrong. This game is, in fact, classic.

There’s a trend towards “realistic” or “mature” games among so-called hard core gamers these days. Usually what this means is an emphasis on first person or close third person viewpoint with a heavy dose of carnage and very little attempt at a higher ideals. Most modern games are, in fact, low fantasies with different varieties of window dressing and little attempt at creative gameplay. Child of Light is a refreshing change from all of these things.

As the name implies, the game approaches its story in a very childish fashion. The whole game is hand drawn and painted in watercolors, the character’s speech (with one exception) and the game narration are set in rhyme and meter and the story feels like it has been ripped straight from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. Aurora is the daughter of an Austrian Duke who’s mother is dead and who’s father has married again giving her, you guessed it, an evil stepmother.

When Aurora catches a cold one evening she winds up At the Back of the North Wind and finds herself in Lemuria, a land with talking mice and a race of people that have angler fish style lights sprouting from their foreheads. Once there she is issued fairy wings and a broadsword as long as she is tall and instructed to find her way home and set things aright.

Interestingly enough, I cannot think of a single video game I’ve played that has so blatantly stolen so many fairytale elements and woven them together and that’s a shame, because Child of Light does a good job juggling all the disparate threads and weaving them into a solid whole. I don’t know if the writers were inspired by George MacDonald but it sure feels like it. At the same time this is not every fairytale you’ve ever read, Child of Light stands on it’s own merits yet still does its source material justice.

What really makes things work is the game’s artwork. Layer on upon layer of beautiful watercolors and carefully measured water and cloud effects give Lemuria a feel of beauty and wonder. It seems totally natural that this is the kind of place where statues come to life, talking mice live on the back of a mountain man (no, not a lumberjack or trapper, he’s a huge man made of stone and the mice are human sized) and you can be asked to catch a wayward flying pig for a village lady.

The game could have stopped there but it also has a beautiful classical soundtrack and, while only the narration is voiced, the voice work is very good. It’s the kind of game you want to spend most of your time wandering around in, and possibly, occasionally, moving towards what is, in theory, your goal.

That brings me to the third aspect I love about this game, namely the unusual gameplay. Most video games that use flight as a mechanic use it either as the focus of the game, complete with complicated controls and often frustrating tests of skill, or just use it as a way to handwave getting from point A to point B most of the time. But Aurora can fly across all maps for most of the game.

This turns what could have been a rehash of most platforming games into something a little more interesting. Yes, Valkyrie Profile did this and it was interesting. And I originally thought adding an element of flight would make the overworld of the game less interesting by making the map more accessible. To my surprise, Ubisoft manages to keep things interesting by adding hazards, flying enemies, and violent winds to keep getting around just difficult enough to pose a challenge without being obnoxiously difficult. Add in all the interesting tricks you can do with your firefly familiar and exploring is rewarding enough that you’ll want to just poke around the map some and take in the sights from time to time.

Of course, when you’re not there are dark creatures out there that need dealing with. Yes, it’s a delightful fairytale flavored game. If you know your Brothers Grimm, though, you know the origin of the word “grim” and that fairytales are not all sugar and light. But on a more fundamental level, the potential for harm befalling your characters is one of the ways you, the player, are inspired to take care of them and get connected with them. As such, it’s hard to cut it out of games with a storyline.

(If the subject of violence in video games interests you David Baumgart of Gaslamp Games has written an interesting and thoughtful meditation on the subject which expands on this idea more than there’s room for here. Tags and comments on that post are not guaranteed to be interesting or thoughtful.)

Much like Aurora’s quest itself, fighting in the game is more about timing and disruption than outright contests of power. While the “active battle” system has existed in RPGs since the early days of the Final Fantasy franchise Child of Light tweaks it so that, in addition to having to wait between each character’s action, you must also wait a brief time between choosing what action you take and when that action occurs. In that short period of time enemies can take actions that interrupt you and, by the same token, you can interrupt enemies while they are preparing their own actions. Winning is often as much about orchestrating a clever series of disruptive moves as it is raw number crunching or twitchy reflexes. All in all, a nice change from most games produced of late.

So. If you like story driven games with a strong sense of whimsy and don’t mind reading in rhyme for a while, check out Child of Light. It’s both fulfilling and fun, something very few games can claim.

The Daedalus Incident

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A “mashup” is where you take two things that seem totally unrelated and blend them into a seamless whole. The term doesn’t imply it but the blending has to seem natural to the point where the two things you’re working with almost look like they were always meant to go together. The term seems to have originated in contemporary music, where homages to previous musicians or blendings of styles seem much more common. But that doesn’t mean it can’t apply to other things.

The Daedalus Incident, by Michael J. Martinez is a great example. It takes fairly hard scifi and smashes it together with alternate history and low fantasy to get a story that is unique and charming.

We start on the venerable planet of Mars, where mining operations are interrupted by an unexpected and theoretically impossible earthquake. (Yes, technically it should be a marsquake but apparently that’s not a word.) As the multinational space command overseeing things there struggles to find a good explanation it quickly becomes apparent things are getting worse.

Meanwhile, Lt. Thomas Weatherby of the British Royal Navy is bound for Mercury. In the late 1700s. In a sailing ship equally at home on the sea or in the sky. And the story hasn’t even gotten weird yet.

The Daedalus Incident is everything you ever wanted if you’re into scifi with an X-Files twist. It’s got everything, from ancient alien astronauts to weird alchemy and beyond. The science here is pretty solid, to the extent it goes (and that may not be as far as you think) but more than that it takes pains to be believable enough to keep us from questioning it without demanding too much of us. There’s a very real element of believability to the nature of Weatherby’s ships – all the old-fashioned nautical terms are clearly well researched and consistent and the made up stuff is blended in seamlessly.

That said, if you’re one of those people who cannot stand, for whatever reason, anything that smacks of handwaving in your scifi this is not the story for you. (Honestly, I’m not sure how you can stand reading scifi at all.) Because frankly there’s a lot here that’s vulnerable to fridge logic and is liable to leave you with an upset stomach after you try and digest it. You’re better off leaving it on the shelf and admiring the pretty colors, because not everyone can handle that.

The plot here is suitably complex – there’s stuff going on in both narrative threads and a good pace and points of view are juggled to keep you interested in what happens next. Suspense is maintained quite well – I figured out who the mole in the ranks of the good guys was about half way through but I was still interested in how it would play out and there are enough other plot threads at work to keep you interested even if you figure it out, too.

All in all, this story is great fun and shows a creativity sadly lacking in a lot of politically or conspiracy oriented scifi these days. There’s a total of three books planned, the second of which is already out, and I plan to chase them all down. It’s probably worth your time, too.

Cool Things: Captain Phillips

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Warning: Do not watch this movie if you do not deal well with stress.

While the packaging for Captain Phillips doesn’t have that warning anywhere on it, I really think it should. If you’re not sure who Captain Phillips is, or why a movie based on real events that happened to him should perk your interest, here’s a quick recap:

Richard Phillips was the captain of the Maersk Alabama when it was attacked by Somali pirates. He and his crew resisted as best they were equipped to and eventually got the pirates off their boat. But the pirates took Captain Phillips along with them as a hostage. It would take a Navy SEAL team to get him back.

The best genre to put Captain Phillips in would be thriller, but that does a huge disservice to the movie and the real man it’s based on. Perhaps the best way to think of it is a character study that runs over two and a half hours long. Or maybe it’s a meditation on the responsibilities that come with leadership. Or maybe it’s just a study of how good men stand up to hard times.

Phillips is not a particularly brave or exceptional man – and I say this in much the same way that Tolkien begins stories about hobbits by noting that they are not particularly brave or exceptional. Rich Phillips is a normal man with kids to worry about, a wife to worry with and a job where he’s spent many years working his way up to middle management. He’s a normal guy who’s job just so happens to involve moving cargo around the Horn of Africa.

I’m not going to dwell on the plot a whole lot, since it’s pretty much ripped straight from real events. It doesn’t have to be believable – it happened!

The cinematography, something I don’t usually dwell on in these segments, is ideal. It’s got that slightly jittery, almost homemade feel that reemphasizes to us that these are not your usual Hollywood glamourized characters.

Tom Hanks as Phillips gets to do something actors are almost never allowed to do – talk like a normal person. He hems and haws his way carefully and deliberately through his lines, not because he’s uncertain but because that’s exactly what fits a man who’s whole life has revolved around making haste slowly, so that the deliveries are made on time. There’s very little glamour in this movie. Frankly, it doesn’t need it.

Everything in this film is so realistic it’s scary. From the early laidback attitude of the crew to their later panicked intensity, the manic energy of the pirates that slowly builds into complete breakdown, we believe something about what we see that most movies can’t quite make us believe: That this happened somewhere, to someone. That something similar could easily happen to us.

So there’s a lot of nail chewing as the crew of Maersk Alabama struggles to keep the pirates off their boat with firehoses and flares, then sabotages them with broken glass and shorted out generators. But all this pales to the abduction of Captain Phillips and the eventual rescue at the hands of the US Navy.

There’s no way to explain the tension this movie builds. There’s no moment of frantic action, no clever twists of the plot. There’s just the integrity of Captain Phillips and our sense that, whatever happens, we’d like to have someone like him in our corner when our time comes. Like all films that focus on the heroism of a good man, the message is that we should strive to be that person, should the time come.

If you can manage to stand up to a couple of hours of pure tension, Captain Phillips will more than make itself worth your time.

An American Tail

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So it’s classic color movie month here at Nate Chen Publications. But before that, I need to make a quick disclaimer – today’s post is not exactly a classic. It was released in 1986, making it younger than I am. However, that also makes it a part of my childhood of which I am very fond. So I hope you’ll indulge me, just a little bit, as I geek out about one of my favorite animated movies from early childhood.

Most people think of animated movies and they think of Disney films like The Lion King, or Beauty and the Beast, or Aladdin or, more recently, of Tangled and Frozen. Or maybe they think of the really classic Disney movies like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. And, to be honest, I do too.

But An American Tail isn’t Disney and I mean in more ways than it’s studio. Yes, it was produced by Amblin Entertainment and Sullivan Bluth Studios. But for another thing, it eschews  many of the themes that define most Disney movies, such as the transformative power of romance or the danger of meddling in the affairs of wizards. Other themes, like talking animals or not entirely accurate song lyrics (“There are no cats in America!”) are there, and the art is similar. But this is very much it’s own work.

The story revolves around Fievel Mousekewitz and his family, immigrant mice who have left Russia. The movie itself leaves the exact reasons for this vague, other than that the Mouskewitz’ home was burned by cassock cats. Keen observers familiar with history will quickly deduce, from the accents of the elder Mousekewitz and their family name, that they were most likely targeted because they were Jewish but this is a subtext that will fly right over the heads of younger children. (I didn’t figure this out until I was telling a friend about the movie in college. All the pieces were there, I’d just never looked at them from the right perspective before.)

Fortunately, An American Tail isn’t a morality play about racism. It’s a fish (or mouse) out of water tale, a story where reality and preconceptions clash and protagonists come out better for it.

Fievel is separated from his family on the boat during a storm. Washed overboard, his family believes he is dead and he must take to the mean streets of New York to try and find them. (Yes, they left Russia and arrived in New York. Don’t ask. I think arriving in New York is a trope of some kind, although it’s not in the catalog.)

The adventure isn’t all Fievel’s, although he’ll have to face down street rats (literally), charity workers, city slickers, idealists and politicians to straighten things out. Through out the course of the story we also glance back to Mr. Mousekewitz and his grieving family. They all have problems to deal with but the biggest one of all – cats.

I guess not everything you heard about America those days was true.

An American Tail isn’t a fantastic movie. But it does touch something deep inside. It’s a story about homes. Fievel has lost his old home, not just left his physical dwelling but been separated from his family, and not every offer of a new one is something that he wants. He has to do a lot of growing up very quickly. But he never gives up the hope that he can get back what he lost. His father used to tell him stories about how things could be better, the good things that had been before and might be again. When offered the chance, more than once, to believe the good things weren’t coming and settle for what he had, Fievel choses to keep looking. With enough perseverance and the right goals, maybe he can make the good things real.

And in the end, he does. The Mouse of Minsk was an odd place to start – but he does.

Really, is there any tale more American than that?

Cool Things: Charades

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Welcome back to classic movie month! All through the merry month of May we’ll be looking at films new enough to be in color but old enough that you may not have heard of them. Today’s film features two of the greatest movie stars of any era: Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

Charades is a story of two people who meet in odd circumstances and have to learn to trust one another and somehow work together – or else. Regina Lampert (Hepburn), or Reggie to her friends, is on vacation with a friend and without the husband she’s seriously considering divorcing. But when she gets back to Paris she discovers someone’s saved her the trouble. Charles Lampert has been murdered trying to leave the city.

Thus begins a twisted yarn of murder, treason, theft and impersonations. At the center is Carson Dyle, a man left for dead during the Second World War, and thousands of dollars of gold intended to finance the Underground movement that was stole by it’s couriers. Among those couriers were Lampert and Dyle.

Of course, Reggie didn’t know about any of that. But Charles seems to have done something with the money and the surviving couriers from the theft all want their piece of the pie. Also among them is a dashing stranger (Grant) who she met at the beginning of the movie and she’ll know by a number of names by the time its over. The goal: Find the money and her husband’s killer and get out with her own skin intact.

There’s a lot going on in Charades. As the name implies, not everyone is who they first appear to be, and neither Reggie or the audience is in on who’s who, so the confusion and distress she feels is easily transmitted to the viewers. As you might expect from a tale of greed and revenge not everything that happens here is pleasant, in fact I would not recommend this as a movie to watch with young children. But the story’s not all dark. It does contain great quantities of Cary Grant being Cary Grant and that’s bound to ammuse. In fact, what might otherwise be a drab movie about characters we aren’t particularly invested in is transformed by the skill and charm of the two leading actors.

But no, that’s not true. For all the romantic overtones and moments of humor, Charades is a thriller at heart and from the moment we see the first corpse things start flying. The legacy of the stolen gold and an abandoned man are not going to be settled easily and the movie drags us along the whole story at a breakneck pace. We get only the occasional breather, a moment for a small smile and a romantic interlude before new discoveries are made and the rules change once again. Yet still, what keeps us caring about the outcome is the warmth and humanity of the central characters.

If you like normal people in surprising circumstances, mystery and action mixed together or tales of the past come back for a reckoning, then Charades may be the film for you.

Cool Things: The Adventures of Robin Hood

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Welcome to the merry month of May! For a while we’ve been looking at some old, black and white movies that are still worth the watching today. There’s still plenty of those out there, and I’m sure we’ll go back and look at them in time, there are a number of older movies, that you may not have heard of, which have been disqualified simply because they were shot in color. Well no more! This month we’re going to look at four great old movies that just so happen to have been made after the transition to color cinematography. Our first example is thematically appropriate in two ways!

The Adventures of Robin Hood is, in my mind, the definitive version of the legend. Why?

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood. Basil Rathebone as Guy of Gisborne. Claude Raines as Prince John! Some of the greatest large scale battle sequences outside Cecile B. DeMille before the starfighter sequences of Star Wars. This film practically oozes with talent and creativity, even as it breaks absolutely no new ground in terms of plot or story.

If you know anything about Robin Hood you already know the basics of this tale. The Good King is in exile, the Evil Prince oppresses the people, the Hero arises and fights the injustice. Hero gets caught but is saved with the help of the Heroine. In the end, the Good King returns and justice is done. It’s not The Downfall of The Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King because not all struggles are on that scale. Sometimes evil is petty and mean and transient and we wonder not if it will ever pass, but why it’s come right now and why it won’t leave us alone.

This movie shines in the strength of the actors. Everyone, from Much the Miller’s Son and Friar Tuck to the nameless knights at Prince John’s table, is given a solid reading. Even the cheesier lines are heartfelt. Flynn is swashbuckling incarnate, even more so than his Zorro counterpart, Tyrone Power. And Rathebone… he’s everything you could ever want in a villain. A razor sharp spring waiting to explode out and slash through anything that gets in his way.

They fight, of course. I could talk about it for hours, but it’d be better if you watched it for yourself.

The next best thing, after the actors, is the eye candy. The costume work, outdoor locations and all the set pieces in this movie are beautiful. Technicolor was a new technology at the time and the images don’t really have the same quality as modern day cameras would provide but even now it’s still beautiful. It’s almost like a watercolor painting brought to life.

Most importantly, it’s fun. Lots of fun. Sure, this story has it’s dark moments. All the good stories do – how could the joy at the end be as joyful if there weren’t a few dark times along the way? But it’s still more than worth it.

There’s nothing here that you haven’t seen somewhere else. But rarely will you see it like in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Check it out.

Cool Things: Mindspace Investigations

Posted by natechen on

He had it all. He was a Level Eight telepath, specializing in Structure. With a lot of time and work he could rebuild a person’s mind, bringing people out of comas or restoring sight to people who hadn’t seen in years. He was a respected member of the Telepath’s Guild, the body governing psychics in the U.S., and eventually got a job teaching his skills to others. He was engaged to marry into a powerful family, and he was just one of a group of likeminded, idealistic and very talented people who were likely to chart the course of the guild for years to come.

Then he volunteered to help out one of his friends with a research project. The purpose of the project? To see if psychic abilities could be enhanced with the use of mind altering drugs.

Now he has no Guild status, no girl and plenty of guilt. He also has a nearly constant craving for Satin, a substance that not only doesn’t enhance the abilities of telepaths but has been outlawed by both the Government and the Guild in the time since he got addicted. He has next to nothing. He isn’t even allowed to handle his own money, on the off chance he might go out and blow it all on drugs.

What he does have is a job for the Decatur Police Department. Mostly he works the interrogation rooms, asking questions and gauging people’s reactions to them in more ways than the typical cop. Of course, with a bunch of felony charges related to his druggie days he can’t testify or work full time, but he can ask questions so long as another witness is along to back him up. And every so often the Homicide detective who pushed so hard to get him his job pulls him out of the interrogation rooms to take to the field.

You see, the world around us isn’t just shaped by our hands and feet, by the objects we take with us or leave behind. It’s also shaped by our thoughts and feelings, the joys we spread and the grudges we hold close. But those thoughts and feelings don’t leave marks in physical space, they leave them in Mindspace. The Guild doesn’t routinely send telepaths out to work with normal, telepathically deaf cops. He is unique. He and Detective Isabella Cherabino go out to murder scenes. There, she looks at the physical evidence and he looks at the Mindspace.

Browsing around in the places where people have died is no fun. In fact, it’s a profoundly disturbing experience. But he does it all the same. Part of this is pure pragmatism. The more time he spends solving murders, the more time he’s not getting high. Three years is a long time clean, and he has no desire to fall off the wagon. Well, that’s not true, he just has more desire to stay on it. And ultimately, that strong desire to stay clean is rooted in the past.

He had it all. Now he has nothing. Nothing, that is, except for a chance to make a difference. He can’t safely remodel people’s minds anymore. But he can find killers. Maybe, just maybe, that will be enough for him to sleep at night.

Mindspace Investigations is a series of stories by Alex Hughes. There’s two short stories and three full length novels, and they are excellent in a number of ways. Obviously, Mindspace world is a sci-fi setting. It’s not just the telepaths. Hughes’ world is set after the Tech Wars, when sentient machines spawned blood borne computer virus and nearly ended humanity as we know it. There’s a strange blend of technologies running around – flying cars juxtaposed with pen and paper. Antigravity building techniques are commonplace but paranoia about wifi runs rampant. Technology isn’t allowed to come even close to thinking for itself. Computers are now controlled technology.

In this kind of a world, a telepathic forensics consultant does a lot to push investigations forward. There aren’t nearly as many fancy technology investigation techniques as you might expect in the future, but there’s still plenty of good old fashioned police work in these books. Following the money, interviewing all the witnesses, the whole nine yards. And since psychics are required by law to inform people of their telepathic abilities before anything learned by telepathy counts as legal evidence gathering techniques… well, it can all get quite complicated.

But not as complicated as not using the protagonist’s name for the entire first book. That’s ridiculously complicated, and it makes writing reviews about them complicated, too. Less thrilled with that than many other aspects of the series.

Still, if you like flawed but relatable characters, good world building or whodunnit’s of just about any stripe, Mindspace Investigations might be right up your alley.

Local Theater: 1984

Posted by natechen on

It’s theater time again. This show isn’t a happy one, it isn’t a fun one and it isn’t a family event. This time around, all for One Productions is taking us into the darkness of what could have been. We’re going to visit Big Brother.

George Orwell’s 1984 is one of the darkest visions of the human condition there has ever been. It surpasses Blade Runner, it surpasses Logan’s Run, it surpasses Brave New World. There’s no allowance for hope, or joy, or even fun in 1984. There’s only the all consuming power of the Party, paranoia, hate and despair.

The tale remains a classic because the people and the ideas it talks about are so eerily familiar. It’s something we could see happening at some point. There have been close shaves with these kinds of states before – Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism. Modern Cuba and North Korea. The list is long, and that’s just the last century or so.

We watch it to jolt ourselves out of comfort, to brace ourselves to confront the evil wherever it may raise it’s head. Come and see 1984. It will disturb you – and that will be a good thing.

Shows are May 2nd-4th and 9th-11th at the Main Branch of the Allen County Public Library. Ticket information can be found here.